Ibraheem Abu Mustafa Reuters
TEL AVIV — Millions of civilians in Israel and the Gaza Strip endured a second night of deadly rocket attacks and airstrikes as the worst violence in years between the Israeli military and Gaza militants continued to escalate Wednesday.
Even as airstrikes were launched and air-raid sirens sounded, Palestinian citizens of Israel poured into streets, burning cars and fighting police in scenes that recalled violent uprisings that rocked the country decades ago.
“We have not seen this kind of violence since October 2000,” said Israel Police Chief Kobi Shabtai, referring to Arab demonstrations in the beginning of the second intifada, or Palestinian mass uprising.
Some 43 Gazans, including 13 children, according to Palestinian health officials, and six Israelis, including one teenage girl, according to Israeli emergency response officials, have been killed in the worst bout of violence in seven years, resurfacing familiar patterns of tit-for-tat retaliatory rocket salvos while also spurring a much more rare outburst of mass civil unrest among Palestinian citizens of Israel.
[Violence between Israelis and Palestinians escalates toward all-out war]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/video/world/apartment-building-in-gaza-collapses-after-israeli-strike/2021/05/12/c02ebca5-f7d6-4910-8c6c-0300f5877570_video.html
On Tuesday night just before 9 p.m., Hamas, the Islamist militant group that rules the Gaza Strip, announced that it would fire rockets at Tel Aviv in response to intense Israeli airstrikes that had brought down a 13-story building, as well as other attacks on high-rises that resulted in at least three casualties. The Israeli military said the 13-story building housed Hamas military intelligence offices and a rocket research and development unit.
“Gaza residents, you are experiencing this military operation because the terror organizations have again chosen to place you in the line of fire,” the Israeli military said in a Facebook post. “Stay away from them. Stay away from the places where they operate. Protect yourselves and your families.”
In response, Hamas lobbed more than 1,000 rockets and mortar shells toward Tel Aviv and its surroundings and at dozens of communities in southern Israel. One rocket directly hit a bus in the central city of Holon, injuring four people, including a 5-year-old child. Rockets also struck near Ben Gurion International Airport, which was temporarily closed and planes rerouted.
On Wednesday morning, the Israeli military instructed all residents, including farmers, living within 2.5 miles of Gaza to temporarily remain in their homes out of concern that Hamas could use short-range rockets, direct-fire rockets or snipers to attack civilians. The Israeli military also expressed concern that Hamas would use tunnels to infiltrate Israeli territory, despite a newly built underground sensor system designed to prevent such incursions.
Israel’s Home Front Command ordered the closing of schools and many businesses in Tel Aviv, Netanya, Beersheba and dozens of other Israeli cities on Wednesday, as Hamas rockets continued to hit Israel throughout the day. It forbade the gathering of more than 10 people in open areas and of 100 people in closed spaces. The government also suspended or reduced train and bus service through towns in southern and central Israel that were hit by rockets the previous night.
Mussa Issa Qawasma
Reuters
Mourners carry the body of Hussein al-Titi, a Palestinian who was killed during stone-throwing clashes with Israeli forces, at Fawwar refugee camp near Hebron, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, May 12, 2021.
In recent years, projectiles from Gaza have fallen close to the coastal enclave, mostly into unoccupied fields and forests. By filling the skies above Tel Aviv with its biggest salvos since the 2014 war, Hamas was seeking to intimidate Israel’s largest population center, analysts said.
“Militarily it’s not that significant, but psychologically it is,” said Amos Yadlin, a former air force general and Israel Defense Forces intelligence chief. “It’s not pleasant to hear the sirens and get up at 3 a.m. to go to the shelter.”
Yadlin equates the targeting of Tel Aviv with Hamas’s decision to launch rockets toward Jerusalem on Monday, one of which damaged a house in a southwestern suburb. The army knew that Hamas had rockets that could reach Jerusalem — but aiming seven of them that way surprised Israeli officials. The move was meant not to hit the Old City but to serve notice that the game had changed.
“Hamas has decided to position itself as the defender of Palestinian Jerusalem,” he said. “This is a new policy, something that Israel missed.”
As sirens blared, loud booms echoed overhead, and the Iron Dome antimissile defense system streaked across the night sky with lines of white light, massive Palestinian demonstrations broke out in Arab towns across Israel. Carrying Palestinian flags, mostly young men gathered en masse to torch synagogues and city hall buildings and throw stones at police and passersby. They chanted slogans both in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and Jerusalem and in protest of what they say is systemic anti-Arab discrimination and oppression by Israel.
In Lod, a mixed Jewish-Arab town in central Israel that has become a center of the riots, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a state of emergency. He arrived in the city early Wednesday following a second night of unrest that began with clashes outside the funeral for a 25-year-old Palestinian man who was killed during confrontations the previous night.
Shabtai, the Israel Police chief, warned that the situation in Lod threatened to devolve into a new intifada. The previous uprising spanned a five-year period marked by wide-scale Hamas bus bombings and brutal Israeli military incursions that cost thousands of Israeli and Palestinian lives.
The Israeli military transferred border patrol units from the West Bank into the city and into the several other Arab towns and mixed Jewish-Arab towns that have seen similar clashes. The Transportation Ministry shut the train line between Tel Aviv and Lod, but reopened it on Wednesday afternoon.
Later that night, in a nearby, unrecognized Arab village that lacked proper bomb shelters, a father and his 16-year-old daughter were killed by a Hamas rocket.
“Hamas missiles do not differentiate between Jews and Arabs,” said Lod Mayor Yair Revivo.
He called for calm in Lod and other cities with large Arab populations. “The day after, we will still have to live here together,” he said.
Hendrix reported from Jerusalem.
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https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiiQFodHRwczovL3d3dy53YXNoaW5ndG9ucG9zdC5jb20vd29ybGQvbWlkZGxlX2Vhc3QvaXNyYWVsLWdhemEtaGFtYXMtaWRmLXJvY2tldHMvMjAyMS8wNS8xMi83OTg5YjQ5Yy1iMjhlLTExZWItYmM5Ni1mZGY1NWRlNDNiZWZfc3RvcnkuaHRtbNIBmAFodHRwczovL3d3dy53YXNoaW5ndG9ucG9zdC5jb20vd29ybGQvbWlkZGxlX2Vhc3QvaXNyYWVsLWdhemEtaGFtYXMtaWRmLXJvY2tldHMvMjAyMS8wNS8xMi83OTg5YjQ5Yy1iMjhlLTExZWItYmM5Ni1mZGY1NWRlNDNiZWZfc3RvcnkuaHRtbD9vdXRwdXRUeXBlPWFtcA?oc=5
2021-05-12 10:27:00Z
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